Indigenous peoples interrupt commodity flows by asserting jurisdiction and sovereignty over their lands and resources in places that form choke points to the circulation of capital. In today’s economy, the state has begun to redefine its “resilience” in terms of its relative success in the protection and expansion of critical infrastructure. We find that there has been a political re-organization of governing authority over Indigenous peoples in Canada as a result, which is driven by greater integration of the private sector as national security “partners.” The securitization of “critical infrastructure”—essentially, supply chains of capital, such as private pipelines and public transport routes—has become the priority in mitigating the potential threat of Indigenous jurisdiction. New political and socio-temporal imperatives have led to shifts in risk evaluation, management, and mitigation practices of state administration, in cooperation with the private sector, to neutralize Indigenous disruption to supply chain infrastructure. In this paper, we examine two forms of risk mitigation: first, the configuration of Indigenous jurisdiction as a “legal risk” by the Department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada; and second, the configuration of Indigenous jurisdiction as a source of potential “emergency.” Built on the literal ground of historical patterns of land grabs and migration, logistical space configures new networks of infrastructure into circuitries of production that cast into vivid relief the imperfections of settler sovereignty and the vital systems of Indigenous law.

Front-line police operations are deeply entwined with less visible activities -or practices not commonly identified as policing -that are carried out by a wide range of participants as strategies of settler-colonial pacification operating through the organizing logics of security and liberal legalism. Using open source texts and records obtained through access to information requests, this article unmaps some of the contemporary strategies employed by Canadian institutions to pacify Indigenous resistance. As a contribution to the body of work seeking to develop the politics of anti-security, the analysis disrupts the binary categories that animate security logic by examining the public order policing approach of the Ontario Provincial Police, the framing of Indigenous resistance as a security threat, and the integral role of Indian Affairs in securing the settler-state.

Drawing on unpublished material on the history of the Culbertson Tract, records obtained through access to information requests, and firsthand knowledge from the community, we trace Mohawk legal and extralegal strategies aimed at reclaiming the Tract to show how Canada legitimizes and manages the continued dispossession of land from the Mohawks of Tyendinaga. Through the criminalization of community members opposing settlement terms under the land claims policy, we conclude that the policy of extinguishment contained in the land claims policy is furthered by policing resistance with the use of security forces on the ground.

Though described as the first milestone towards securing Canada’s critical infrastructure (CI), the 2009 National Strategy for Critical Infrastructure is the most recent effort in decades of federal engagement with the problem of how to secure the material elements that underpin state, economy, and society. In this article, we show how a little-known civil defence program initiated after WWII to protect important industrial facilities from military enemies has transformed in the contemporary period into the monitoring of a range of political and social movements as perceived dangers to what is understood today as CI. We view these changes as indicative of transformations in the exercise of police power through which the contemporary colonial-liberal order is enacted.

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